Ivy League Edge?

The Wall St. Journal reports on a survey conducted by Payscale.com showing that the college one attends “can make a big difference in starting pay, and that difference is largely sustained into midcareer.”

Personally, I would like to see this study conducted so that it removes the impact of SAT and high school GPA. Are the Ivy League schools simply cherry picking those mostly likely to earn the big bucks, or are they really adding value and enabling people of similar talent to earn more? I suspect it’s the former. Nonetheless, the perception is that it’s the latter.

Payscale slices and dices its data in multiple ways; you can go to the site to see the variations for yourselves. Here are a few highlights from the WSJ article:

“Liberal-arts-school graduates see their median total compensation grow by 95% after about 10 years, to $89,379 from $45,747.”

“Engineering-school grads, who earn the highest starting salaries, yet
see their paychecks expand just 76% by their career midpoints to
$103,842 from $59,058.”

“History-majors-turned-business-consultants earn a median total
compensation of $104,000, similar to their counterparts who pursued a
business major like economics — whose grads earn about $98,000 overall the PayScale study shows.”